Talk about timely. CommsDesign has a recent piece on the development by Motorola of an "isochronous network, developed with input from Nintendo Co. Ltd., Sony Corp. and other game platform developers, [that] will be extended into other markets to serve as a "feeder" for future ad-hoc mesh-based piconets that use 802.11 wireless technology as their underlying infrastructure". Slashdot also has a related thread. Isochronous ad-hoc mesh-based piconets? This almost seems like it could have been generated by dack.com.

Last month, in Watch this airspace and parasitic networks, we flagged the emergence of mesh networks, where end user devices can also be routing devices. Wired Magazine has a short article: A New Spin on the Wireless Web this month and mentions the interesting start-up Mesh Networks. Mesh networks, where user devices and routing nodes can get co-mingled, might be an interesting twist on Metcalfe's law, which says the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users or nodes. Think about it. Where all user devices are also routing devices, it's pretty obvious that, at least for the beginning part of the 'S' innovation curve, the value of network externalities is even greater. This has some interesting implications for seeding 'core' networks by seeding the 'edges'.

Last month, I mentioned the arrival of "Wind-up Mobile". There's now a first review of the Motorola Freecharge in ZDNet UK. Just like prepaid rechargeable GSM cards, I imagine this will become very popular in developing countries.

Ken Binmore, the designer of the exceptionally lucrative UK 3G mobile phone auction two years ago, has slammed telecom executives for "whingeing" that they paid too much and dismissed calls for the consumer to foot the bill. [Ananova]

Infosync has got a review of the new colour display Nokia 7650 that's got an integrated digital camera for picture taking and sending, support for the MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) that's a step up over SMS, a photo album for storing pictures, GPRS, Java support, joystick navigation and a Symbian-based user interface.

From the cool new NTT Docomo FOMA 3G devices front: NTT Docomo has announced that it will market a new 3G-compatible two-part terminal, the SH2101V, with a PDA base unit that communicates through Bluetooth with a separate wireless handset. The base unit has a built-in camera that enables 64kbps real-time videoconferencing - while the wireless handset is used for voice communication. The handset can also be used, via the PDA, as a simple voice phone or for checking e-mail (even when the PDA is folded away) or as a remote control when playing downloaded music on the PDA.

O.K., it's a busy news day for predictive text input. Further to my note earlier on "Dasher", the Economist today just happens to have an article entitled More Power to the Thumb, discussing a new text input method from Eatoni Ergonomics called Letterwise. The Economist says it's a worthy competitor to T9, who is owned by AOL.

Although more and more of us are carrying around smartphones or PDAs, I've always been frustrated that we can't just point our devices at what we want and instantly pull information out of magazines, off advertising posters, or dump train or flight schedules into our calendar applications. Because most smartphones and PDAs of the future will have cameras built into them (like this or this or this), it was just a matter of time before someone would recognize a market opportunity. As reported in Wireless Week, International Wireless and Bango.net have recently announced they will use CodePoint so that users can point a handset at a bar code and deliver content directly into a device. Hope something like this will be available in every handset in the future.

In the search for the optimum input method where a keyboard is not practical (e.g., PDAs, mobile Internet handsets), there's been some novel research going on at the University of Cambridge. The Dasher project has produced an unusual text-entry interface driven by pointing gestures. A prototype version can be downloaded for a Pocket PC. There's work going on to produce an eye-tracking version which they hope would allow users to visually write text as fast as normal handwriting. It's also now an open source project at SourceForge.net.

Nokia to Join With I.B.M. in 2 Ventures on Software: Nokia and IBM. will develop digital rights management software for what wireless operators call light content — ring tones, games, logos and pictures. For example, portions of popular songs can be downloaded for a small fee and used as the ring tone on a cellphone. The current market exists mainly in Europe and Japan, where wireless services are more advanced than in the United States, and among young people, 25 and under. In Europe, the market for such light content is $500 million a year. [New York Times: Technology]

The Internet's root name servers are seen as a possible soft target for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks (in fact, they already are as described in this paper). A possible method to deal with this vulnerability that's getting some serious consideration is the use of IPv4 anycasting, as first conceptualized in RFC 1546. A recently released primer on anycast from Cisco can be found here (PDF). The application of anycasting to providing DNS services was explored in a number of Internet drafts which eventually became the informational RFC 3258: Distributing Authoritative Name Servers via Shared Unicast Addresses. RFC 3258 describes how authoritative name servers with the same IP address could be replicated at different locations. The route to these servers would be advertised for each location and the routing protocols would direct traffic to the topologically nearest server. As an example of how anycasting for the root name servers could possible work, there's already a project, named AS112, that uses anycast to distribute the load for bogus requests for private address space (as described in RFC 1918, also see description of problem here). A possible benefit of using anycast for the root name service is that it may solve both some technical security issues as well as some political issues (i.e., better geo-political distribution of the root name servers). On the other hand, it may make it much harder to deploy DNSSEC. It'll be interesting to watch this play out...

I'm on my flight back from Paris where I participated in Nom de Domaine 2002 (in English, Domain Name 2002), which supposedly will become an annual event. ISOC France and Cigref, the organizers, brought together quite a number of speakers for an interesting programme and workshops. I gave a talk (PowerPoint) this morning in a session on internationalized domain names and ENUM. I'm told that all the presentations and speeches given will eventually become available on the conference web site. Last night, the organizers hosted a dinner in a restaurant near the Champs-Elysées which helped the speakers to get to know each other. It was interesting to see many of the same people in last week's ICANN meeting in Bucharest, the "World Summit on the Information Society preparatory meetings" in Geneva, and at this meeting in Paris.

The demise of CIX was announced last January according to the bottom of this press release from a new entitity called the United States Internet Service Provider Association, which according to the press release says "The US ISPA was created from the former Commercial Internet eXchange ('CIX'), which announced today that it was disbanding and being reconstituted with an entirely new membership group and Internet focus under the US ISPA name." It's the surprising end of an era. The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was founded in 1991 to provide a commercial interconnection point so that commercial traffic could be exchanged without compromising the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of NSFNET. Later, CIX became a trade association and lobbying force for ISPs in the US and it's somewhat surprising that it didn't manage to rally enough support to survive. In general, I've been surprised that ISPs have never been able to collectively front very effective trade associations that defend their interests, a topic which Scott Mace discusses in his two articles on Who Speaks for the ISPs?: part 1; part 2.

Bret Fausett's icann.Blog notices it first: The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) secretariat has now posted the materials it presented to the ICANN Board in Bucharest. The Bucharest communique is here, and the GAC's Statement on ICANN Reform is here. We've been asked by a number of people why, in Annex 2 of the GAC statement on Reform, there is the statement "The International Telecommunication Union disassociates itself from portions of this document." The explanation is that based on a number of discussions among Member States within the ITU on ICANN and ICANN reform, there are clearly a wide range of views. Under these circumstances, the ITU Secretariat has to reflect this and disassociate itself from a number of the substantive statements made in the GAC document. These will be later specifically documented for the minutes of this GAC meeting.

From the covergence file: The Register is reporting on Coming soon: SMS TV. For readers in countries who aren't aware of the popularity of text messaging over mobile phones, NUA gives one example by reporting that, according to the Swedish regulator, PTS, Swedish mobile users sent over 1 billion SMS messages during 2001. [Only for statistics mavens: I always thought it'd be interesting to plot the growth of SMS messaging vis-à-vis Internet email traffic but I'm unaware of where to find any real good indicators on email traffic. Anyone who has an idea on how to estimate this is invited to contact me.]

The information presented within this blog comes from various organizations around the world. ITU encourages users to seek more detailed information from the original source through the links provided.
Links to third-party websites are provided for the convenience of all users. The ITU is not responsible for the accuracy, currency or the reliability of the content on these third-party websites. ITU does not offer any guarantee in that regard nor does ITU endorse the third-party organizations, their sites or content.